(Ottawa) “Are Bills C-11 and C-18 enough to save the world of Quebec media? » This is the question asked by Bloc MP Martin Champoux the day after the dismissal of nearly a third of TVA Group employees. “Time is against us,” recognizes Minister Pascale St-Onge, who hopes to see the result of this legislative modernization “in the coming months, in the coming years. »
“And ideally, I would like to see at the end of all this newsrooms that are rehiring journalists. That’s what we’re trying to do with the modernization of our laws,” she said.
The Minister of Canadian Heritage said she was “touched and saddened” by the TVA cuts, but she did not come forward with emergency aid. She recalled that the government is offering a 25% tax credit on the payroll of newsrooms and that it has increased the Canadian Media Fund and the Telefilm Canada envelope to support the audiovisual industry.
Pascale St-Onge was in Montreal on Friday for the signing of an audiovisual co-production treaty with Switzerland on the sidelines of the Cinemania festival.
The president and CEO of Quebecor, Pierre Karl Péladeau, announced the day before the dismissal of 547 TVA employees to save the television network. This is the end of in-house production for entertainment shows. The cuts also affect regional news stations.
“It’s catastrophic, but unfortunately predictable,” lamented Bloc member Martin Champoux during question period Friday in the House of Commons. “If this happens to TVA, all our media are at risk. »
“If we add this to the written and local media which are in the midst of a crisis, we have a perfect recipe for our regions to disappear from the radar screen,” he added.
Neither law to support the media has yet come into force since they received royal assent last spring. C-11 amended the Broadcasting Act to add an obligation for digital platforms to invest in Canadian and Quebec content. Consultations to modernize the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission’s regulations in this regard are scheduled to begin next week.
C-18 on online news forces Web giants to enter into remuneration agreements with news media in exchange for their content. Since its adoption, Meta has blocked news articles on its platforms to avoid legislation and Google has threatened to do the same thing. The law is due to come into force on December 19.
“We should at least ensure that C-18 does not do more harm than good, that is to say that I hope that there are negotiations at the moment, that they are serious because at the moment, the media are too fragile for them to have to endure the fact that all content would be removed,” responded independent senator Julie Miville-Dechêne.
His amendment so that the negotiation of remuneration agreements also takes into account the advantage for the media of disseminating their content on digital platforms was rejected by the government.
“Maybe having an orientation that was a la carte, piece by piece negotiations actually gave too much power to the web giants and maybe there should have been a more universal system of royalties that would have been imposed by the government,” admitted in an interview the deputy leader of the New Democratic Party, Alexandre Boulerice, who already worked at TVA at the turn of the 2000s.
“There, it seems that it’s true that at the moment, we have the impression that we are in a bit of an impasse with C-18,” he continued.
He believes that all media could benefit from emergency aid given that “information is an essential good for democratic life”.
Such aid cannot be improvised, according to the conservative MP and former journalist, Gérard Deltell, who believes that the government has taken the wrong path. The cuts at TVA remind him of those which deprived him of his position at TQS in 2008.
“What we are currently seeing with the C-18 is that no one has won there until now,” noted Gérard Deltell. There is less information being disseminated, journalists are losing, the media are losing, citizens are losing. »
Minister St-Onge confirmed that discussions are continuing with Google, which would prefer to finance an independent fund for journalism instead of entering into individual agreements with each media outlet. She also blamed the Conservatives who opposed C-18 and C-11.
With The Canadian Press